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Hope's Kiss

BY

Angela Knight

EXCERPT

Chapter One - Partial

He was naked, covered in blood, and lying in the floor of a steel cage.

She’d still know Mark Wilder anywhere.

Detective Hope Barton scanned the room from the bottom step, eyes flicking from the cage to the bloody wooden table beside it, to the shackles that hung from the blood-splattered cement walls.

The big, dimly lit basement reeked of murder, body fluids, rotting gore, and helpless suffering. Her stomach heaved, but Hope had been a Violent Crimes detective for two years, and she’d stood over her share of slaughter. Swallowing hard, she forced her dinner back where it belonged and did her job.

“Mark.” Hope strode toward the cage, ignoring the sticky puddles drying on the cement underfoot. She was too busy scanning the room for the key to his cell. There was no sign of one, dammit. “What the hell happened to you?” When he didn’t move, she raised her voice to a cop’s bark. “Mark!”

He stirred and lifted his head from the cage’s dirty floor. One dazed green eye met hers under a shock of matted blond hair. Blood and filth streaked his face, his lips were cut and bruised, and his left eye was swollen shut.

Somebody had beaten the crap out of him. And judging from his bloody knuckles, he’d fought back hard. Which was no surprise. Mark never took anything lying down.

Her guts twisted. How was she going to get him out of here? She grabbed the thick iron bars in both hands. “Mark. . . . Mark, it’s Hope.”

For a suspended instant, he stared at her without any recognition at all.

Until he roared with a tortured animal howl and leaped at her in an impossible eight-foot bound. Pure reflex had her jolting back, barely dodging his hand as it shot through the bars.

How did he do that? Nobody could jump like that!

Mark’s lips peeled back from snapping teeth, his powerful body straining to reach her with fingers curled into claws. His bare, bloody feet thudded on the bars as he kicked them savagely, trying to bend the steel. His one good eye glittered in frenzy.

He has fangs. She froze, staring at his sharply pointed canine teeth. Sweet God, Mark has fangs!

He sure as hell hadn’t had them in high school. She’d put her tongue in his mouth often enough to know.

As he bellowed and clawed, Hope damn near drew down on him. She managed to drag her hand away from the grip of her shoulder-holstered 9mil. Glock, but it took an effort. I’m not going to shoot Mark Wilder.

God, she ached to call for backup, but she no longer trusted anyone in the department.

Mark finally stopped howling. Clinging to the bars, he stared at her, his good eye feral and desperate, like a wolf’s with one leg in a bear trap. Recognition flickered in his gaze. “Hope?” His voice sounded broken, raspy, as if he’d been screaming. Screaming for a very long time.

Pity raked at her heart, along with a certain tense relief. At least he’d recognized her. “Yeah, it’s me.” She gave him a twisted smile. “Guess you were right. There is a vampire in Reede County.”

Hope Barton, a lieutenant in the Reede County Sheriff's Office, discovers a chamber of horrors in the basement of an old house. What's worse, her ex-lover, Mark Wilder, is locked in one of the cells. He is naked and covered in bites and blood, and he has been changed into a vampire. Unless Hope can reawaken Mark’s human desires, he will remain the slave of a vicious predator.

No one in the Sheriff’s Office wants to believe the murderer of is a vampire. That hardly surprises Hope, but the authorities’ abnormal denial has a more terrifying cause, a predator with irresistable psychic abilities. Hope finds herself alone against her colleages, a sadistic vampire, and her dangerous ex-lover’s conflicting vampiric and human needs.

She must overcome Mark’s darkest desires, and her own. If they don’t destroy the predator, he will go on killing, and he will drag Mark in his murderous wake.

About The Author:

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

Angela Knight’s first book was written in pencil and illustrated in crayon; she was nine years old at the time. But her mother was enthralled, and Angela was hooked.

In the years that followed, Angela managed to figure out a way to make a living—more or less—at what she loved best: writing. After a short career as a comic book writer, she became a newspaper reporter, covering everything from school board meetings to murders. Several of her stories won South Carolina Press Association awards under her real name.

Along the way, she found herself playing Lois Lane to her detective husband’s Superman. He’d go off to solve murders, and she’d sneak around after him trying to find out what was going on. The only time things got really uncomfortable was the day she watched him hunt pipe bombs, an experience she never wants to repeat.

But her first writing love has always been romance. She read The Wolf and The Dove at 15, at least until her mother caught her at it.

In 1996, she discovered the small press publisher Red Sage Publishing, and realized her dream of romance publication in the company’s Secrets 2 anthology. Since then, her work has appeared in four Secrets anthologies. She’s tremendously grateful to publisher Alexandria Kendall for the opportunity to make her dreams come true. She believes her writer son, Antony, will one day follow in her footsteps.